The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse - Illustrations

Illustrations

Mrs. Tittlemouse called upon Potter's keen observation of insects, arachnids, and amphibians, and her youthful experience drawing them. Their depictions in text and illustration reflect her understanding of insect anatomy, colouration, and behaviour; they are rendered with accuracy, humour, and true to their individual natures – she knew that toads only seek water during the spawning season, for example, and that they can smell honey. The spider and the butterfly are very much like those she drew from microscopic studies in the 1890s.

Potter's source for the wildlife and the insect drawings in Mrs. Tittlemouse were those she had executed in her early adulthood, either directly from nature or by observing specimens in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The interest in the book's illustrations lies in the microscopic accuracy of the insects rather than in any human qualities exhibited by Mrs. Tittlemouse or Mr. Jackson. Potter is uncharacteristically careless in the depiction of the insects however. They appear to be drawn for their own sake, or seem to be out of scale with the heroine, or to change scale without reason. The ladybird seems larger than Mrs. Tittlemouse, and the spider appears first larger than Mrs. Tittlemouse in one picture and then smaller in another. The bees are sometimes out of scale with both the toad and the mouse.

The nature artist and the fantasy artist in Potter are at odds: the mouse, the toad, and the insects share the same habitat but there seems no logical reason for the mouse and the toad to be humanised while the insects remain their natural selves. Logically, they should be humanised, too. While the toad is an invader like the insects, he does Mrs. Tittlemouse the service of ridding her house of the bees yet is inexplicably excluded from the party, an affront to the reader's sense of social right and wrong. It is possible Potter's carelessness in the details of Mrs. Tittlemouse can be attributed to a desire on her part to simply display her ability to draw from nature or to her interest in book production being supplanted by a growing interest in farming and local life and politics in Sawrey.